Note II apps to plan the best alternative holiday

Take an unconventional trip away from the mainstream

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There are plenty of holiday apps out there on Android. You could use the easyJet app to book yourself a flight to a mainstream hotel, for example. But that wouldn’t be much fun. What you want is a more boutique holiday experience, one where you won’t recognise the type of IKEA furniture in the breakfast room.

There are plenty of more innovative options for arranging your fun times to be found in Android’s immense app listings, which let you book on the go, check out reviews from fellow tourists who’ve already slept in the bed you’ve got your eyes on and generally ensure your precious away-from-the-grind time passes as comfortably as possible.

Samsung’s GALAXY Note II also makes capturing these ideas easy, with its S Pen and image grabbing tools making it simple to create your own future holiday wish-list, complete with illustrations and photos of the locations you’ll soon be vomiting in, around and over.

So here’s a selection of the finest off-beaten-track Android holiday planner apps.

Airbnb is a more personal holiday letting app, which eschews chain hotels and aggressive hire car companies in favour of linking people with… people.

It lists rooms to let, houses, sofa beds and more, letting you cater for your budget and level of interaction with other people you’d like to let yourself in for. Sort of an eBay for holidays, if you will. Some countries think it’s a tax dodge that lets people rent rooms without declaring them, which adds an extra layer of excitement to it all.

Gogobot is a combination of social network and travel app, that lets users read reviews from friends and receive personal recommendations from people who’ve visited the place you’re heading off to.

It’s built around a simple and accessible postcard system, with travellers leaving edited summaries pinned inside the app for would-be visitors to leave. It’s a more friendly experience than simply reading a list of pros and cons about your future hotel.

A hugely comprehensive flight checker, which aggregates the aggregators and lets you search the likes of Expedia, Travelocity and Lastminute, plus it has individual listings for airlines from Aer Lingus to Virgin (there are no airlines starting with the letters W, X, Y or Z it would seem).

For those whose travel budget is calculated in pence as well as pounds, Hostelworld is ideal. It ranks affordable hostels, letting you know how aggressive the cockroaches are and exactly how many bearded loners you’ll be sharing a bath with in the morning.

The app uses the GALAXY Note II’s GPS system to search the local area, ideal for finding a place to stay if you’ve just pitched up in some random town with no clue where you’re sleeping.

Tripit claims to “magically” create a travel itinerary for you. All you have to do is forward all the disparate emails about bookings, tickets and reservations you’ve pulled together when organising your dream escape from reality to the app, which will then build one huge timeline from you.

Show this to the man or woman with the clipboard and you’ll be waved through like a star. And probably given a complimentary cocktail for being so well organised.

If you like to take enormous risks and leave your bed arrangements until the very afternoon of your trip, this is the one.

This app is entirely built around offering daily deals, with its hotel listings dumping unsold rooms up around lunchtime for potential visitors to snap up for a discount. If you get lucky, there’s the chance of bagging some five-star luxury for the price of a depressing B&B.

If you plan on doing something extreme or potentially illegal while intoxicated on the local brews, get this on your phone before you leave.

It’s sort of a little mobile assistant, which you fill with contact details, medical advice, insurance plan numbers and so on, so you can thrust it in the direction of a medical person or exotically dressed policeman while lapsing in and out of consciousness. Help them help you in your hour of need.